Sunday, September 18, 2011

1. No one can sleep late on Sunday, because the church bells go wacko starting at 9 AM.

2. The new metrosexual Spanish professor for T's class is much more in gamba then last year's version because he wears modern eye glasses with the rectangular frames, has a sense of humor, and conducts the class in Spanish. He carries a Calvin Klein man purse (as all men except for F do in Italy) that means all homework must be written on loose leaf sheets that will fit in the narrow folder inside said man purse.

3. Last night for dinner F and I ate cauliflower and peas in an Indian tikka sauce on a bed of popcorn. It was delicious and made me feel like a culinary rebel because I knew no one else in the whole country or perhaps the world was eating what we were eating. Try it, you'll like it!

4. An ode to sidereel.com. If you are an expat with a television addiction, this website will make you want to write a free verse poetry in its honor. Thank you for letting me watch Survivor. Amen.

5. I have officially infiltrated the snooty gym of Lucca, called fittingly enough: the EGO. Freudians have a laugh. . . My friend Massimo has a friend who works there doing something that means her phone rings off the hook, but she has no hiring power. We will call her Irena to hide her true identity. Although, her name is actually Irena. After several pleading phone calls she gave in and let me have the e-mail to one of the gym owners who called me a day after receiving my alluring letter in which I mentioned New York, Shakira, and dimagrimento/weightloss all in one sentence. I have an interview set up for Tuesday. This is the same gym that I had a pass to take classes at two years ago and whose changing room experience scarred me for life. It seems I was a bit too pudgy and way too pale to take off my clothes in front of the skeletal orange ladies that surrounded me. There was even a tittering of giggles by one Ego employee. I also didn't have the proper post shower flip flops and my gym bag did a winnie-the-pooh and would not come out of the tiny annorexic sized locker. Now that I am still pale but have gotten down to a size 4 --due to working out two hours a day and eating only one helping of a meal instead of six, I am going to march back in there with my inner thighs encased in lycra and try to shake that place until money comes out.

6. I had to call all the people we usually have to the "Energy dinner" on the third Saturday of the month to say that we would not be providing the usual array of bruschetta because it turns out that it costs a thousand euro to pay the commercialista to open a non-profit association and I don't have enough Bioenergy clients yet to justify that kind of expenditure and neither do they. Everyone was nice about it and we will all stay in touch. Other members of the group have entered into a pyramid scheme, lord help them, which they assure me is fine because when they draw it out, it takes the form of a circle. In the meantime, I am going to meet with Rebecca who does akashic readings and Sarah who does a kind of shamanic law of attraction thing to see if we can put together an event of some kind. No one told me Sarah was the star of a popular reality show when she first moved here called No Going Back or that she had published a bunch of beautiful books available on Amazon and runs a kind of thriving entrepreneurial kingdom, but it is just as well because then I would have been intimidated and now I just know her as Sarah with the same sense of humor that I've got.

7. I still have not learned or tried to ride a bike.

8. Despite the bread, the neighbors still have not talked to us. And the wife, called Carol Brady until further notice, looked at me when she passed us on the street as if I were something unpleasant.